Articles Posted in Hospital Negligence

Recently more and more hospital patients have been receiving bills with hefty charges from unexpected out of network doctors or other medical service providers such as labs or Radiologists. Services that used to be included in the daily hospital rate now comes as additional costs because they are provided by out of network contractors. Many emergency rooms, for example, are now staffed by out-of-network doctors who bill separately.

Out-of-network doctor charges are not negotiable and can reach phenomenal amounts. For example a patient requiring a skin graft would pay $1,781 to an in-network doctor while an out-of-network doctor would potentially charge $150,500. In a recent article in the New York Times, Elisabeth Rosenthal exposes this practice.

Tubing misconnection error is medical malpractice mostly caused by nursing or hospital negligence that can result in severe personal injury or death of the patient. Misconnections errors have a high risk to happen not only because most patients checking into a hospital are likely to receive at least an IV but also because tubes with different functions can too easily be connected together. Gardiner Harris from the New York Times raised the alarm on this problem in 2010 in the article “U.S. Inaction Lets Look-Alike Tubes Kill Patients”.

To address this issue and prevent these types of medical errors, tubing connector standards have recently been developed through a collaboration of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), the Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation (AAMI), clinicians, manufacturers and regulators, including the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

New connectors are going to start to reach the market during the fourth quarter of 2014 and the transition phase is expected to continue through 2015.

To reduce IV medication errors and possible contamination, the Belmont’s St. Barnabas Hospital in the Bronx, NYC, just acquired a high-tech medication machine that uses robots to fill syringes, sanitize intravenous medications and make sure that patients receive the proper medication.

When an error occurs with intravenous medication, harmful effects to the patient may happen faster and be more severe than errors with oral medications, due the direct administration into the bloodstream.

The RIVA system acquired by the hospital is a fully automated IV compounding system used by hospital pharmacies to prepare intravenous medication (syringes and IV bags) for general hospital needs, chemotherapy and pediatric needs.

CLABSI can be medical malpractice. Most infections occur when medical devices are not properly sanitized or when hospital employees are negligent of patients safety regulations.

One hospital recently demonstrated that CLABSI can be prevented. The White Memorial Medical Center in Los Angeles implemented a training program that resulted in zero iatrogenic pneumothorax hospital wide and zero CLABSI in the ICU. See video below.

Hospital-associated infection can be medical malpractice. 5% of hospital inpatients develop an infection during their stay. As a result patients who develop an infection usually have to extend their stay in the hospital. Hospital acquired infection if not diagnosed and treated properly can also lead to the death of the patient. .

Blood transfusion is a very common hospital procedure during which the patient has a risk of developing an infection.

Hospitals have different strategies as to when a blood transfusion is required. Some have a liberal strategy which means that they will administer red blood cells to a patient when the patient’s hemoglobin level falls below 10 g/dL and some have a more restrictive strategy and will give a blood transfusion to the patient once the level of hemoglobin is below 8 or 7 g/dL.